Please find full information about the update with screenshots of enhancements on KVS forum: KVS 6.3.0 update.
Whats new in KVS 6.3.0:
- We continue with background code refactoring. This version has fully revamped system and network calls across the whole product.
- Our Nextgen architecture is now started being introduced in admin panel in several places. One of the new editors is System settings, where you can specify timezone, memory limits for different processes and set of networking options. Some of these options were previously available in Content settings, some of them are brand new.
- We finally added Email settings, so that you can now set up using 3d-party email service without our assistance. Email template editing is coming in the next updates.
- Screenshot formats now support AVIF in addition to WebP and JPG formats. This could be controversial for thumbs, since AVIF images are created 10 times longer than JPG and provide not a big difference in comparison to WebP (~55% smaller size vs ~33% smaller size for WebP). However what is more important is player poster images, which are bigger than thumbs and using AVIF for them may be beneficial for your SEO. Player poster images are typically considered as LCP in Google performance evaluation. Screenshot formats now allow you to configure player poster settings as well, and our recommendation would be to switch them to AVIF. Previously KVS would automatically convert all player poster images to WebP (if supported by imagemagick), but with this update you will need to switch them to AVIF manually if you want.
- WebP and AVIF support was also added into album formats as well.
- In screenshot and album formats KVS would now show a popup with visual confirmation of the options, where you can see the modified options applied to some random thumbs. This should be useful to understand if the new options are fine or need some adjustments.
- Stats section in admin panel has some crucial changes. The index page is now a list of configurable charts where you can customize from 7 available types of charts, which will likely be extended in future. Each chart supports filtering and data display options. Hourly stats are now supported, and one of the charts allows comparing today's data with yesterday's. Some of the traffic stats now switched to Nextgen code, and they allow now filtering by multiple different values for the same filter, for example it is possible now to filter combined stats for several countries or devices.
- In stats settings you can now choose to not collect content or search stats from a specific set of countries, or collect only from a specific set of countries. This may be useful to reduce garbage stats and only collect from your primary set of countries. This is also useful when you pay tokens for video views and you don't want to pay for specific countries. Same for search queries, you can avoid queries that are submitted by users from certain countries, that may later appear on your site and in SEO.
- In traffic stats KVS will now populate separate stats for known SEO bots. Also requests from SEO bots will now be excluded from content stats (video views, file requests and etc.).
- Rotator logic was finalized to support satellites. Now if enabled, rotator will collect combined stats from primary project and all satellites. Also fixed issue with broken screenshots in some cases when rotator is configured to partially delete screenshots.
- When vertical screenshots are merged together, KVS would now use screenshots from different parts of videos, not from the beginning only.
- Added support for billing.creditcard (this is subsidiary of Verotel). Verotel was extended with chargebacks and refunds transaction types.
- Import and export (including feeds) will now consider using display name instead of username for users.
- In Website UI section it will now be possible to modify and upload static files, such as CSS, JS and images. This may reduce the necessity of providing FTP access to theme developers, however there is still need to modify .htaccess file directly from server filesystem if URL pattern changes are required.
- Due to security concerns we disallowed execution of PHP fragments in templates by default, unless you have system option allow_php_in_templates activated in /admin/include/setup.php. Previously this option was only required to save templates with {{php}} directives from admin panel, but it didn't prevent the code from being executed (for example if added via FTP). Now such code will not be executed if the option is not activated manually. This is incompatibility change and KVS update plugin should warn about such cases during update.
- In memberzone settings it is now possible to configure unconfirmed accounts auto-removal after N days.
- In logon block it will be possible to choose between list of member statuses that are allowed to log in.
- In search queries we added ability to specify redirect for each query individually. This can be used to redirect some indexed queries with abused terminology to other search results.
Bugs that have been fixed:
- [SEVERE] Several new bugs related to PHP 8 support.
- [MEDIUM] A player poster could be not rendered correctly in some cases.
- [MEDIUM] There was an issue with correct detection of Chrome browser in mobile Apple devices.
- [LOW] Feed auto-deletion logic didn't run correctly with its schedule.
- [LOW] Fixed several issues with player subtitles display.
- [LOW] It was possible for users to add new videos into playlists that were locked by admin.